Trouble Recovering Projects on 2.2.2

I have been recording songs on Audacity 2.2.2 for quite a while now. Using an Acer Laptop with Windows 7 Professional, and the laptop was shut down one day. I had several projects open, about 36. I figured, no big deal, I’ll just use the crash recovery system. Big deal. I open Audacity and it shows me the recovery window, and I select “Recover Projects”. It works pretty well, it says there’s some file inconsistencies but that shows up whenever I recover projects. It gets to the last file and boom, Audacity is not responding. It was just one song I wanted to keep out of all the others that were just sort of random voice clips and various noodling things, but since it was never saved, I don’t know which one it is.

I understand that the version I’m using is obsolete, and this computer is not the greatest thing you can use for recording.

Thanks.

Wow, that’s a lot of open projects.


Had any of them been saved?

Some of them, not the exact revisions but pretty recent ones.

Read through these steps carefully, and in full, before attempting recovery. You will probably only get one shot at this. If you have questions, please ask.

With Audacity closed (not running);

Go to the hidden folder
C:\Users**\AppData\Roaming\audacity**
(where is your Windows log-in name)
and create a new folder.

Name the folder “backup”.

Copy (not “move”) all of the .autosave files from
C:\Users**\AppData\Roaming\audacity\AutoSave**
into the new “backup” folder.
This is for backup purposes - leave this alone now, it can be deleted at the end when as much as possible has been recovered.

Create another new folder and call it “mytemp”.
Move any .autosave files that are named “New Project …” from C:\Users**\AppData\Roaming\audacity\AutoSave** into the “mytemp” folder.



Go to the hidden folder
C:\Users**\AppData\Local\Temp**
and copy the folder audacity_temp to your Desktop (or somewhere else convenient).
Be careful with this folder, it will be needed later.



Launch Audacity.
It should offer to recover any of the projects that were previously saved.

Assuming that some projects are recovered, save them.


After saving the projects, quit Audacity




Open the “mytemp” folder and move ONE .autosave file out of there into
C:\Users**\AppData\Roaming\audacity\AutoSave**

Open the copy of audacity_temp from your Desktop and copy (not “move”) the entire contents into
C:\Users**\AppData\Local\Temp\audacity_temp**

Restart Audacity and recover the project.

  • If it is recovered, save it, then quit Audacity.
  • If it cannot be recovered, quit Audacity then delete the .autosave file from C:\Users**\AppData\Roaming\audacity\AutoSave** (give an appropriate blessing if you wish - this project is gone and lost forever).

Don’t forget to quit Audacity after saving the project.


Repeat the steps above to recover each of the “New Project … .autosave” files.


Good luck.

Tip: Avoid having multiple projects open at the same time unless absolutely essential.
Tip2: Save backups frequently.

Thanks, good to know there might be a bit of hope for these.

You mean move and not copy, correct?

I don’t seem to have a folder in Temp called audacity__temp, or anything related to audacity. What do I do?

Yes.
You should have copies of all of the .autosave files in the new “backup” folder.
All of the “New Project…” autosave files in their original location (I’m guessing that these will all be recoverable).
All of the other autosave files in the new “mytemp” folder (I’m guessing that one or more of these will not be recoverable).

So the idea is:

  1. Recover all of the named projects first (the ones that are not “New Project … .autosave”)
  2. Attempt to recover the un-saved "New Project … .autosave) projects one at a time.

The C:\Users<user-name>\AppData folder is hidden by Windows.
See here for how to make them visible: Show hidden files - Microsoft Support

I have my hidden files shown, I can get into C:\Users<user>\AppData\Temp, but there aren’t any folders even on my computer called Audacity_Temp. This is an older version, 2.2.2, so would it be possible the folder has a different name?

Is there a folder:
C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Temp

Yes but there aren’t any files/folders relating to Audacity

Default folder locations for Audacity 2.2.2 on Windows 10:

Autosave folder.
This is where the “.autosave” files are located:
C:\Users<user>\AppData\Roaming\audacity\AutoSave

Temp folder.
This is where the project data folders for unsaved projects are located:
C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData

Okay, thanks.

Trying to recover the files resulted the same as previously, when I got to the last file, Audacity stopped working correctly. I followed all the steps up to opening Audacity and recovering but I reached a dead end. IF I’M CORRECT, I may know which project is the one I’m looking for, because it is a larger autosave file than the others which would make sense and it’s fairly recent and unnamed. Is it possible to remove all the other files from the autosave folder but keep them in the “backup” folder and see if it works?

So I tried taking the named projects out of the AutoSave file and loading up the projects in audacity. It didn’t crash this time, but sadly all the tracks have been replaced with silence. Is this the end of the road for my projects or is there something else I can do?

The tracks will be replaced with silence if the data files can’t be found.
Did you backup C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData ?

After each attempt, the folder C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Audacity\SessionData will be emptied by Audacity on exit, which is why you need to copy the backed up SessionData contents back into the SessionData folder for each attempt.

I did back it up to my desktop, but I’m hoping the files weren’t already missing